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"Please limit your message to 500 characters"

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  "Please limit your message to 500 characters" Sylvia Else <sylvia@not.at.this.address> - 2016-01-14 11:36 +1100
    Re: "Please limit your message to 500 characters" Rich <rich@example.invalid> - 2016-01-14 00:57 +0000
    Re: "Please limit your message to 500 characters" BartC <bc@freeuk.com> - 2016-01-14 01:33 +0000
      Re: "Please limit your message to 500 characters" Rich <rich@example.invalid> - 2016-01-14 02:30 +0000
        Re: "Please limit your message to 500 characters" Paul Sture <nospam@sture.ch> - 2016-01-17 16:39 +0100
          Re: "Please limit your message to 500 characters" Kees Nuyt <k.nuyt@nospam.demon.nl> - 2016-01-18 01:20 +0100
    Re: "Please limit your message to 500 characters" Michael Black <et472@ncf.ca> - 2016-01-13 21:12 -0500
    Re: "Please limit your message to 500 characters" scott@alfter.diespammersdie.us (Scott Alfter) - 2016-01-21 17:59 +0000
      Re: "Please limit your message to 500 characters" Sylvia Else <sylvia@not.at.this.address> - 2016-01-22 11:13 +1100
        Re: "Please limit your message to 500 characters" Rich <rich@example.invalid> - 2016-01-22 00:47 +0000
          Re: "Please limit your message to 500 characters" Sylvia Else <sylvia@not.at.this.address> - 2016-01-22 13:54 +1100
          Re: "Please limit your message to 500 characters" Huge <Huge@nowhere.much.invalid> - 2016-01-22 23:02 +0000
            Re: "Please limit your message to 500 characters" Paul Sture <nospam@sture.ch> - 2016-01-29 10:22 +0100

#9968 — "Please limit your message to 500 characters"

And you waited until I tried to submit it before telling me this 
because....?

Why the limit anyway? If the required detail dictates a longer message, 
then that's what's needed. If I omit details because they won't fit, 
you'll have to contact me to get them.

My cynical nature makes me suspect the limit's there for no better 
reason than that your developer doesn't know how to handle arbitrary 
length data.

Sylvia.

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#9971

Sylvia Else <sylvia@not.at.this.address> wrote:
> And you waited until I tried to submit it before telling me this 
> because....?

> Why the limit anyway?

Most likely - some data modeler asked someone: "what should be the max
size of this field" and someone else thought for a second and decided:
"oh, 500 characters ought to be good", and so in the underlying SQL
database, there is a VARCHAR(500) column that stores the 'message'.

...

> My cynical nature makes me suspect the limit's there for no better 
> reason than that your developer doesn't know how to handle arbitrary 
> length data.

Yup.....

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#9973

On 14/01/2016 00:36, Sylvia Else wrote:
> And you waited until I tried to submit it before telling me this
> because....?
>
> Why the limit anyway? If the required detail dictates a longer message,
> then that's what's needed. If I omit details because they won't fit,
> you'll have to contact me to get them.
>
> My cynical nature makes me suspect the limit's there for no better
> reason than that your developer doesn't know how to handle arbitrary
> length data.

What's the reason for 140-character limits for SMS and for Twitter?

Perhaps it's to encourage people to keep to the point!

Without a limit, people could copy & paste War and Peace, or Mime 
encodings of multi-GB binary files (and suppose hundreds of people 
maliciously planned to do just that, all at the same time).

When I submit my paper tax return, there is a panel for extra 
information, which usually suggests continuing on separate sheets of 
paper if the space is insufficient. So your 500 characters could include 
a link to a bigger document.

-- 
Bartc

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#9976

BartC <bc@freeuk.com> wrote:
> On 14/01/2016 00:36, Sylvia Else wrote:
> > And you waited until I tried to submit it before telling me this
> > because....?
> >
> > Why the limit anyway? If the required detail dictates a longer message,
> > then that's what's needed. If I omit details because they won't fit,
> > you'll have to contact me to get them.
> >
> > My cynical nature makes me suspect the limit's there for no better
> > reason than that your developer doesn't know how to handle arbitrary
> > length data.

> What's the reason for 140-character limits for SMS and for Twitter?

For Twitter - arbitrary (although they might have been just copying
SMS).

For SMS, that was the limit of what could be stuffed into the space in
the existing control channel that is now used to transmit the SMS
message.  Remember, SMS was not designed in, it was added on later when
someone realized they could shoe-horn it into the existing phone
side-channel control protocol.

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#10044

On 2016-01-14, Rich <rich@example.invalid> wrote:
> BartC <bc@freeuk.com> wrote:
>> On 14/01/2016 00:36, Sylvia Else wrote:
>> > And you waited until I tried to submit it before telling me this
>> > because....?
>> >
>> > Why the limit anyway? If the required detail dictates a longer message,
>> > then that's what's needed. If I omit details because they won't fit,
>> > you'll have to contact me to get them.
>> >
>> > My cynical nature makes me suspect the limit's there for no better
>> > reason than that your developer doesn't know how to handle arbitrary
>> > length data.
>
>> What's the reason for 140-character limits for SMS and for Twitter?
>
> For Twitter - arbitrary (although they might have been just copying
> SMS).

Please feel free to correct me if I'm wrong, but I was under the
impression that Twitter deliberately chose the limit so that tweets
could be sent and broadcast via SMS.

> For SMS, that was the limit of what could be stuffed into the space in
> the existing control channel that is now used to transmit the SMS
> message.  Remember, SMS was not designed in, it was added on later when
> someone realized they could shoe-horn it into the existing phone
> side-channel control protocol.

It also meant that you didn't need a smartphone to participate. My 1998
and 2006 Nokias, for example, would have been fine, and neither were
"smartphones".

Receiving SMS messages is free in Europe and other parts of the world,
so receiving a gazillion Tweets was not going to cost you.

-- 
An invention needs to make sense in the world in which it's finished,
not the world in which it's started.                  -- Ray Kurzweil

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#10049

On Sun, 17 Jan 2016 16:39:26 +0100, Paul Sture <nospam@sture.ch>
wrote:

> Please feel free to correct me if I'm wrong, but I was under the
> impression that Twitter deliberately chose the limit so that tweets
> could be sent and broadcast via SMS.

You're right.
-- 
Kees Nuyt

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#9975

On Thu, 14 Jan 2016, Sylvia Else wrote:

> And you waited until I tried to submit it before telling me this because....?
>
> Why the limit anyway? If the required detail dictates a longer message, then 
> that's what's needed. If I omit details because they won't fit, you'll have 
> to contact me to get them.
>
> My cynical nature makes me suspect the limit's there for no better reason 
> than that your developer doesn't know how to handle arbitrary length data.
>
It's to put you in your place.

"This is my space, I get to spout off as much as I want, but you, the 
reader, only gets to put in a comment that's not much longer than "Me 
too".

I've certainly noticed this with blog postings.  SOmeone gets it wrong, 
and there isn't enough space to write a proper answer.  Editing can remove 
important points.

But I think it's happened with those surveys that stores have on their 
cash register slips, go to a URL and fill out the survey.  They offer a 
prize, so I tend to fill them out, but every so often, I actually have an 
important comment to make.  And usually I'm thwarted by the limited space 
for a response.

It may even have come up when making a complaint to a business, and if it 
did, it was one of those ones that didn't have email, so you had to use a 
form, and I could show the sequence of interactions that never changed 
despite 9 months going by and me still not getting that item I ordered 
(and paid for) months before.  It makes sense to include any sequences 
like that, yet the limit doesn't allow it.

The Ottawa Freenet has a web forum, and one time someone linked to an 
article about something (which is one way to be verbose without saying 
anything), and it turned out replies were limited to some small number of 
characters.  So the first poster gets to say something without saying 
anything (he certainly didn't put the article into his own words), yet a 
sincere response when I've given more thought to it than just reading an 
article is not allowed?

But we are used to an egalitarian space here in usenet, we say 
what we want.  The web shifted that, to someone owning the space, and we just get 
to comment at their whim. People set themselves up as some authority, or 
hope to be so, and one way is by flashing a badge and then keeping the 
responses to very brief.

It's the online equivalent of a talk radio show, where the host keeps 
spouting off, and then when there's a caller, cuts them off and gives 
another speech and then says "we have to go to another caller" (or 
commercial) rather than give the caller a chance to say more.  And 
inevitably, there isn't another caller, or commercial, the host keeps 
repeating the subject of the discussion and giving out the phone number, 
hoping someone will call, yet forgetting that they didnt' have a proper 
conversation with the one who had called.

   Michael

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#10060

In article <dfo8stFbv96U1@mid.individual.net>,
Sylvia Else  <sylvia@not.at.this.address> wrote:
>And you waited until I tried to submit it before telling me this 
>because....?
>
>Why the limit anyway? If the required detail dictates a longer message, 
>then that's what's needed. If I omit details because they won't fit, 
>you'll have to contact me to get them.
>
>My cynical nature makes me suspect the limit's there for no better 
>reason than that your developer doesn't know how to handle arbitrary 
>length data.

He must never heard of varchar(max) (or its equivalent in databases other
than SQL Server).

What's worse than that, though, is a password field with a length limit
(especially an absurdly low limit like 8-12 characters).  That they're
imposing a length limit on passwords implies that they're storing passwords
directly (DANGER WILL ROBINSON!), not hashing them and storing the hashes. 
I prefer to let KeePass generate 24-32 characters of gibberish to use as a
password.

  _/_
 / v \ Scott Alfter (remove the obvious to send mail)
(IIGS( https://alfter.us/           Top-posting!
 \_^_/                              >What's the most annoying thing on Usenet?

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#10067

On 22/01/2016 4:59 AM, Scott Alfter wrote:
> In article <dfo8stFbv96U1@mid.individual.net>,

> What's worse than that, though, is a password field with a length limit
> (especially an absurdly low limit like 8-12 characters).  That they're
> imposing a length limit on passwords implies that they're storing passwords
> directly (DANGER WILL ROBINSON!), not hashing them and storing the hashes.
> I prefer to let KeePass generate 24-32 characters of gibberish to use as a
> password.

I've raised that exact issue with a couple of organisations. Never got a 
response, though.

Sylvia.

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#10068

Sylvia Else <sylvia@not.at.this.address> wrote:
> On 22/01/2016 4:59 AM, Scott Alfter wrote:
> > In article <dfo8stFbv96U1@mid.individual.net>,

> > What's worse than that, though, is a password field with a length
> > limit (especially an absurdly low limit like 8-12 characters). 
> > That they're imposing a length limit on passwords implies that
> > they're storing passwords directly (DANGER WILL ROBINSON!), not
> > hashing them and storing the hashes. I prefer to let KeePass
> > generate 24-32 characters of gibberish to use as a password.

> I've raised that exact issue with a couple of organisations. Never
> got a response, though.

If their IT guys are incompetent enough to be storing passwords in a
char(12) or varchar(12) column in their db in the clear, they are
likely also sufficiently tech/security incompetent to understand why
that is a bad thing to be doing.

Therefore, they simply did not understand your issue, and ignored it.

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#10070

On 22/01/2016 11:47 AM, Rich wrote:
> Sylvia Else <sylvia@not.at.this.address> wrote:
>> On 22/01/2016 4:59 AM, Scott Alfter wrote:
>>> In article <dfo8stFbv96U1@mid.individual.net>,
>
>>> What's worse than that, though, is a password field with a length
>>> limit (especially an absurdly low limit like 8-12 characters).
>>> That they're imposing a length limit on passwords implies that
>>> they're storing passwords directly (DANGER WILL ROBINSON!), not
>>> hashing them and storing the hashes. I prefer to let KeePass
>>> generate 24-32 characters of gibberish to use as a password.
>
>> I've raised that exact issue with a couple of organisations. Never
>> got a response, though.
>
> If their IT guys are incompetent enough to be storing passwords in a
> char(12) or varchar(12) column in their db in the clear, they are
> likely also sufficiently tech/security incompetent to understand why
> that is a bad thing to be doing.
>
> Therefore, they simply did not understand your issue, and ignored it.
>

I think the latter is entirely possible, with the added problem that the 
person who fields these messages has even less technical understanding, 
and can't even figure out who to forward it too - hence round file.

Sylvia.

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#10094

On 2016-01-22, Rich <rich@example.invalid> wrote:
> Sylvia Else <sylvia@not.at.this.address> wrote:
>> On 22/01/2016 4:59 AM, Scott Alfter wrote:
>> > In article <dfo8stFbv96U1@mid.individual.net>,
>
>> > What's worse than that, though, is a password field with a length
>> > limit (especially an absurdly low limit like 8-12 characters). 
>> > That they're imposing a length limit on passwords implies that
>> > they're storing passwords directly (DANGER WILL ROBINSON!), not
>> > hashing them and storing the hashes. I prefer to let KeePass
>> > generate 24-32 characters of gibberish to use as a password.
>
>> I've raised that exact issue with a couple of organisations. Never
>> got a response, though.
>
> If their IT guys are incompetent enough to be storing passwords in a
> char(12) or varchar(12) column in their db in the clear, they are
> likely also sufficiently tech/security incompetent to understand why
> that is a bad thing to be doing.
>
> Therefore, they simply did not understand your issue, and ignored it.

More likely their management would not permit them to respond.

When I was working, we'd regularly get emails from people saying things
like "Your website is fucked because $THIS", to which the techie reply was
"You're wrong because $THAT, go away moron", and the management response
was not to respond in any way.


-- 
Today is Boomtime, the 22nd day of Chaos in the YOLD 3182
                  I don't have an attitude problem.
    If you have a problem with my attitude, that's your problem.

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#10183

On 2016-01-22, Huge <Huge@nowhere.much.invalid> wrote:
> On 2016-01-22, Rich <rich@example.invalid> wrote:
>> Sylvia Else <sylvia@not.at.this.address> wrote:
>>> On 22/01/2016 4:59 AM, Scott Alfter wrote:
>>> > In article <dfo8stFbv96U1@mid.individual.net>,
>>
>>> > What's worse than that, though, is a password field with a length
>>> > limit (especially an absurdly low limit like 8-12 characters). 
>>> > That they're imposing a length limit on passwords implies that
>>> > they're storing passwords directly (DANGER WILL ROBINSON!), not
>>> > hashing them and storing the hashes. I prefer to let KeePass
>>> > generate 24-32 characters of gibberish to use as a password.
>>
>>> I've raised that exact issue with a couple of organisations. Never
>>> got a response, though.
>>
>> If their IT guys are incompetent enough to be storing passwords in a
>> char(12) or varchar(12) column in their db in the clear, they are
>> likely also sufficiently tech/security incompetent to understand why
>> that is a bad thing to be doing.
>>
>> Therefore, they simply did not understand your issue, and ignored it.
>
> More likely their management would not permit them to respond.
>
> When I was working, we'd regularly get emails from people saying
> things like "Your website is fucked because $THIS", to which the
> techie reply was "You're wrong because $THAT, go away moron", and the
> management response was not to respond in any way.

I had this many years ago when testing a new extension to the IF
statement in a certain language.  Yes I was fully aware that this was
still a beta feature but the idiot simply pointed me at the printed
manual, which obviously didn't contain the new syntax. He didn't do
it politely either.


-- 
An invention needs to make sense in the world in which it's finished,
not the world in which it's started.                  -- Ray Kurzweil

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